Saturday, August 27, 2005

Race all the way to the bottom, baby!

Membership is at its lowest in a century. Locally, teachers and auto workers are being pressured to take pay and benefit cuts. Mechanics for Northwest went on strike Saturday and watched helplessly as replacement workers took their place and members of other airline unions crossed picket lines.

Detroit, the cradle of the labor movement, is ground zero in a battle for the soul -- and survival -- of organized labor. Unions are losing pay, losing members, and even losing the sympathy of supporters like Roth to the corporations that employ them.

So tell me again how wonderful globalization is. We can all live in perpetual job insecurity, watching our real wages sink, and likely be unemployable in our 50s and 60s (while the retirement age soars upward) as we transition from "careers" to "casual employment". Of course most of the loony right is sure everything would get better if we just abolished the minimum wage and environmental laws and the loony left is glad that Americans (the bastards!) are getting their just desserts for being the source for all evil in the worldTM . And a lot of folks who are going to be hurt will cheer the approaching storm until it flattens their house.